Up and Down Wall Street

Now, It's the Wilshire 3,666

As companies find other ways to raise cash, number of U.S. stocks keeps shrinking.

So the Winter Olympics isn't exactly wintry, the Super Bowl wasn't super, the jobs market doesn't have enough jobs, and even the swimsuits in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue seem to be getting a lot smaller. To this swelling roster of things struggling to live up to their names, you can now add the mighty U.S. stock market.

These days, there's a lot less stock in our stock market. It isn't just because the pool of outstanding shares has shrunk as companies buy back record amounts of their stock, and the era of banks...